BLACKWATER PARK

"Blackwater Park" is the essential Prog metal album, a masterpiece to bow to.

Opeth's fifth album is widely considered one of the best metal album of all time, and is by many more loved than those early classic metal albums like "Master Of Puppets", "Rust In Peace", "The Number Of The Beast" and many others. I too feel like this album challenges me and interests me more than those timeless masterpieces. Indeed, "Blackwater Park" is THE progressive death metal album, along wih the previous effort by the band "Still Life".

What makes this so universally acclaimed is that it's probably the most accessible death metal record, thanks to the crushingly beautiful moments that are here present. But die hard death fans will also be satisfied, with the powerful, yet complex riffs that are the true skeleton of each of these eight songs. The production is crystal clear, the mixing is fantastic, everything here sounds so beautiful and graceful, even if it's an indeed violent record. The guitars are crunchy and thick sounding as hell, the vocals are amazingly brutal when leader Akerfeldt growls, the drums are as sharp and precise like never before. These qualities guarantee though the style of this particular record; each song, long as it is, has many time changes, a lot of hooks, different melodies; it gets from loud and violent to a soft, melancholic piece that makes your soul shiver, to get loud once again.

"The Leper Affinity", "Bleak", the title track and "The Drapery Falls" all use this formula, even though they all have completely different structures. These epic songs are the ultimate towers of the album, while the other tracks seem simply to give yet another touch of perfection and decoration, so that the album turns out as it is. For Example, "Harvest" is a great, memorable but quite sad sounding ballad, and on the contrary "The Funeral Portrait" is the heaviest song here.

"Blackwater Park" is the essential Prog metal album, a masterpiece to bow to. Everything about this album excites me and satisfies me completely. This is one of those perfect metal albums that makes you proud of liking and being a fan of the genre.

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